The Plight of the Native Americans

As in the East, expansion into the plains and mountains by
miners, ranchers, and settlers led to increasing conflicts
with the Native Americans of the West. Many tribes of
Native Americans -- from the Utes of the Great Basin to the
Nez Perces of Idaho -- fought the whites at one time or
another. But the Sioux of the Northern Plains and the
Apache of the Southwest provided the most significant
opposition to frontier advance. Led by such resourceful
leaders as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Sioux were
particularly skilled at high-speed mounted warfare. The
Apaches were equally adept and highly elusive, fighting in
their environs of desert and canyons.

Conflicts with the Plains Indians worsened after an
incident where the Dakota (part of the Sioux nation),
declaring war against the U.S. government because of
long-standing grievances, killed five white settlers.
Rebellions and attacks continued through the Civil War. In
1876 the last serious Sioux war erupted, when the Dakota
gold rush penetrated the Black Hills. The Army was supposed
to keep miners off Sioux hunting grounds, but did little to
protect the Sioux lands. When ordered to take action
against bands of Sioux hunting on the range according to
their treaty rights, however, it moved quickly and
vigorously.

In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, Colonel
George Custer, leading a small detachment of cavalry,
encountered a vastly superior force of Sioux and their
allies on the Little Bighorn River. Custer and his men were
completely annihilated. Nonetheless the Native-American
insurgency was soon suppressed. Later, in 1890, a ghost
dance ritual on the Northern Sioux reservation at Wounded
Knee, South Dakota, led to an uprising and a last, tragic
encounter that ended in the death of nearly 300 Sioux men,
women, and children.

Long before this, however, the way of life of the Plains
Indians had been destroyed by an expanding white
population, the coming of the railroads, and the slaughter
of the buffalo, almost exterminated in the decade after
1870 by the settlers' indiscriminate hunting.

The Apache wars in the Southwest dragged on until Geronimo,
the last important chief, was captured in 1886.

Government policy ever since the Monroe administration had
been to move the Native Americans beyond the reach of the
white frontier. But inevitably the reservations had become
smaller and more crowded. Some Americans began to protest
the government's treatment of Native Americans. Helen Hunt
Jackson, for example, an Easterner living in the West,
wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), which dramatized their
plight and struck a chord in the nation's conscience. Most
reformers believed the Native American should be
assimilated into the dominant culture. The federal
government even set up a school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
in an attempt to impose white values and beliefs on
Native-American youths. (It was at this school that Jim
Thorpe, often considered the best athlete the United States
has produced, gained fame in the early 20th century.)

In 1887 the Dawes (General Allotment) Act reversed U.S.
Native-American policy, permitting the president to divide
up tribal land and parcel out 65 hectares of land to each
head of a family. Such allotments were to be held in trust
by the government for 25 years, after which time the owner
won full title and citizenship. Lands not thus distributed,
however, were offered for sale to settlers. This policy,
however well-intentioned, proved disastrous, since it
allowed more plundering of Native-American lands. Moreover,
its assault on the communal organization of tribes caused
further disruption of traditional culture. In 1934 U.S.
policy was reversed yet again by the Indian Reorganization
Act, which attempted to protect tribal and communal life on
the reservations.